Bill Clinton said he realised in 2011 it was “just a matter of time” before Vladimir Putin would move on Ukraine after a chilling discussion with Russia’s president in Davos, Switzerland.
During that encounter, Clinton said, Putin rejected a US-brokered deal agreed by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, to respect Ukraine’s territory in exchange for Kyiv relinquishing its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal.
“Vladimir Putin told me in 2011 — three years before he took Crimea — that he did not agree with the agreement I made with Boris Yeltsin,” the former US president recalled. “He said . . . ‘I don’t agree with it. And I do not support it. And I am not bound by it.’ And I knew from that day forward it was just a matter of time.”
Clinton shared that recollection during a joint appearance with his wife Hillary, the former secretary of state and presidential candidate, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, where they were interviewed by Carlyle Group chair David Rubenstein.
The Clintons urged the west to strengthen its support for Ukraine and said Kyiv could prevail if given adequate arms and ammunition. Failure to stand with Ukraine, they warned, would not only embolden Putin but also China’s president Xi Jinping.
Russia’s military failures in Ukraine and a resolute western response to its invasion, Hillary Clinton argued, had deterred a campaign by Xi to reclaim Taiwan that may have been more advanced than appreciated.
She said: “Xi saw that. And I think before the Russian invasion, there was a good chance he would have moved on Taiwan within two to three years. I think that timetable has been pushed back.”
She also echoed her husband’s distrust of Putin, whose malign intervention she has blamed for her surprise defeat to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. “[Putin] is in what he views as a righteous struggle to undermine western democracy and reinstitute, as much as he can, the Russian empire. So he’s not going to stop,” she said.
To end hostilities, Hillary Clinton argued, Ukraine must either defeat Russia or at least regain the territory lost in the east since Russia’s invasion last year. “They need leverage,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust him at a negotiating table under any circumstances, unless Ukrainians — backed by us — have enough leverage.”
Turning to US politics, Bill Clinton — a veteran of budget showdowns with his Republican adversaries — said risking a default because of the Republican-controlled Congress’s refusal to raise the debt ceiling was “nuts” and that the US needed to pay its bills.
“It should not be a political football,” Bill Clinton said of the debt ceiling. “On the other hand, we’re going to have to show more fiscal discipline in the coming years.”
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